Love and Monsters (TV story)
Love and Monsters 'is the tenth episode of the second series of ''Doctor Who. It was written by Russell T. Davies, directed by Dan Zeff and featured David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor and Billie Piper as Rose Tyler. Overview To be added Synopsis As a young lad, Elton Pope had an encounter with the Doctor and has ever since tried to make sense of it all. He's researched other sightings of the Doctor and soon finds others who also had encounters with him. The group takes to meeting one another trying to learn more about him and learn who he is. Their group is taken over in a way with the arrival of Victor Kennedy who organises them and brings some discipline to their work. One by one however, they start to disappear and Elton realises that there is much more going on than he had bargained for. Plot An ordinary young man gingerly approaches the Doctor's TARDIS while rushing across an industrial estate. Hearing a commotion inside a nearby warehouse, he goes inside to investigate and Hoix hiding in there before he is witness to the intervention of the Doctor and Rose. While they chase it (in a Scooby-Doo-esque sequence), the Doctor stops and asks the man if they've met before he races off. The young man, a Londoner by the name of Elton Pope, narrates his story via his video camera. He introduces himself and tells how, when only three or four years old, he came downstairs one night to find a strange man in his house: the Doctor. He goes on to mention how he was witness to various alien incursions connected to the Doctor, such as the Auton massacre, the spaceship crash of Big Ben and the invasion last Christmas Day. Following these incidents, Elton goes looking for strange occurrences and finds a picture of the Doctor, looking exactly as he did all those years ago on a blog. He meets with the blog's founder Ursula Blake who believes his story about the Doctor and introduces him to her friends Bliss, Bridget Sinclair and Colin Skinner, all of whom have similar stories about the Doctor. Originally taking the name LINDA (short for London Investigation 'n' Detective Agency, as coined by Elton), they soon become more of a social group, enjoying their company and indulging in their favourite hobbies. That all changes with the abrupt arrival of Victor Kennedy one, an evidently wealthy gentleman who doesn't touch people because of what he claims to be a skin condition. Producing evidence that allows him to claim that he can help find the Doctor, Kennedy takes over LINDA and forces the group to work more like an office than a social group, making them all miserable; soon, Bliss vanishes altogether. When Elton gets a lead on the Doctor, he goes to investigate it, leading to the Hoix incident. Victor is furious that Elton balked at finding him and decides to change tactics: giving everybody a picture of Rose and telling them to track her down instead. While scouting for Rose, Elton runs into Rose's mother Jackie in a laundrette. Quite quickly, he finds himself a regular visitor of hers, receiving calls to do odd jobs on account of Jackie finding him attractive. One night, after one of her jobs, Jackie tries to seduce Elton and he sees this as an opportunity but a phone call from Rose brings her to her senses. While he goes out to get pizza, Elton feels ashamed of using her like this and realises that he loves Ursula. On his return, he is confronted by Jackie, who found the photo of Rose in his jacket; he insists he wasn't trying to upset or hurt her, but she rounds on him, proclaiming that despite everything, she'll defend the Doctor and Rose to the end of her life and tells him to leave before running off in tears. Knowing that doing this is wrong, he scorns Kennedy for ruining what LINDA was and what they had, citing Bliss and Bridget's disappearance as proof. Deciding that none of them will continue like this, he asks Ursula out to dinner and Mr. Skinner agrees to walk out with them. As they leave, however, Kennedy offers to help Skinner find Bridget and he stays behind while Elton and Ursula leave. Outside, Ursula notices that she forgot her phone and they go back inside for it. When they return for it they find Skinner has disappeared and Kennedy has transformed into a corpulent green alien — the Abzorbaloff, as Elton calls it. He shows Skinner's face protruding from his stomach and Bridget's face emerging from his back while Bliss was, unfortunately, emerging from his left buttock. Swiping his cane, Ursula demands with the threat of violence for Kennedy to restore the others; as it pleads for mercy, he lunges forward and grabs her hand, which starts to disappear into his arm. Before Elton's eyes, Ursula's entire body is sucked into Kennedy's and her face manifests itself in his chest. Elton begs despairingly for Kennedy to return her to him but he taunts that the process is irreversible. Ursula, now able to read Kennedy's thoughts, warns Elton that he's next for absorption and Kennedy attacks. Elton runs with Kennedy in pursuit; he is unable to get very far before his hits a dead end. Kennedy taunts him further, while Elton consigns himself to his fate, Kennedy having taken away everything that matters to him. Before Kenney absorbs him as well, they are interrupted by the arrival of the TARDIS. The Doctor warns Elton for the ear-chewing he's about to receive as an angry Rose emerges and lays into him for upsetting her mother. The Doctor questions the Abzorbaloff about his home planet, Clom, surprisingly the twin planet of Raxacoricofallapatorius, the homeworld of the Slitheen. Proclaiming that the Doctor would make an excellent feast, Kennedy threatens to absorb Elton unless he submits. Initially pretending to allow it, the Doctor subtly prompts the absorbed LINDA members into action and they use what individual strength they have to pull on Kennedy's body, restricting him from moving as he drops his cane. Ursula tells Elton to snap the cane and he breaks it across his knee and Kennedy and all his victims dissolve into a puddle, seeping into the ground, the limitation field maintaining his integrity broken. Before disappearing, the last vestiges of Ursula say goodbye to Elton and he sobs while Rose comforts him. Later, the Doctor sits with Elton and explains that on the night he first saw him, he was hunting a living shadow that had escaped its home dimension. He'd managed to stop it but not before it had murdered his mother. In Elton's video, a montage of memories of Elton's mother plays before ending in a shot of her leaving him as a young boy in a park. Shortly after, Elton wraps up his documentary, concluding that, while not his fault, the Doctor's life destroyed all those closest to him, citing the meaning of Stephen King's quote: "Salvation and damnation are the same thing." He muses that it's naturally going to happen to all those that touch the Doctor; he then wonders how long it'll be before Rose and Jackie suffer the same fate. As he gets maudlin, however, Elton does admit that the Doctor did do him one last courtesy: with his sonic screwdriver, he managed to partially restore Ursula, allowing her to exist but left her living as a face protruding from the paving slab that Kennedy dissolved into. Despite their situation, the pair still love each other and have found some form of happiness. He ends his film on a better note, saying that the world isn't all it seems to be — it's much better. Cast * The Doctor - David Tennant * Rose Tyler - Billie Piper * Jackie Tyler - Camille Coduri * Victor Kennedy - Peter Kay * Elton Pope - Marc Warren * Ursula Blake - Shirley Henderson * Mr Skinner - Simon Greenall * Bridget - Moya Brady * Bliss - Kathryn Drysdale * The Hoix - Paul Kasey * Mrs Croot - Bella Emberg Crew To be added References To be added Story Notes To be added Continuity To be added Home video and audio releases To be added External Links * Official ''Love and Monsters'' page on '''Doctor Who Website